In Janice Kaplan’s best-selling book, The Gratitude Diaries, she spent a year looking at the bright side of life and counting her blessings, which turned out to be a very good thing. Then the former Parade magazine editor and longtime TV producer met academic and risk expert Barnaby Marsh, who convinced her that she –and we—could indeed make our own luck in many different ways. The two collaborated and the result is their new book, How Luck Happens: Using the Science of Luck to Transform Work, Love, and Life (Dutton), complete with stories and case studies about how luck can appear in our lives very much by design.

Read on for a story about how Marsh convinced Kaplan to experiment with finding luck all around her.

Chapter One

Prepare to Be Lucky

Be open to opportunity. . . . get the information you need. . . .see what you’re not seeing . . . drive to the intersection of chance, talent, and hard work

Barnaby’s Luck Lab at the Institute for Advanced Study was tucked away amidst the beautiful wooded fields of Princeton, New Jersey—a perfect place for thinking big thoughts about the science of making luck. As we took a walk through the peaceful grounds together one morning, Barnaby told me that Albert Einstein wandered these same tree-lined paths while coming up with his famous theories. Our new ideas might not disrupt relativity, but we hoped they would change the way people thought about luck—and the possibilities for their own futures.

It had rained hard the previous night, and the sun hadn’t yet dried out the wet ground. Scooting around a puddle, I told Barnaby that writing my previous book, The Gratitude Diaries, had taught me that we have more control over our own happiness than we sometimes realize. I was delighted that the book had inspired so many people to lead happier lives, and I had a feeling that understanding how to make yourself lucky—in any circumstance—could have a similar effect.

Barnaby nodded. “If you’re driven to make your life a little better and wonder why things don’t always go your way, our new approach will let you claim the luck that should be yours.”

We both agreed that luck isn’t the same as random chance. If you flip a coin ten times to determine your future, you are relying on chance—and most people would agree that’s pretty silly. If you talk to people, prepare yourself, look for opportunity, and then jump on the unexpected events that might (randomly) appear, you are making luck. And that’s what we all need to do.

“Luck isn’t a zero sum game. There’s plenty of luck for everyone if you know where and how to look for it,” Barnaby said.

Barnaby thought the evidence was pretty clear that luck is not passive—it requires action, and many of the events that may seem like random chance are not so random after all. He was convinced that by understanding the underlying dynamics of luck, you can gain control over aspects of your life that once seemed to depend on chance, fate, or the phases of the moon. We would work together using insights and recent discoveries in psychology, behavioral economics, mathematics and neuroscience to develop a new way of understanding luck.

“We’re at the starting point of a brand new field and instead of finding the research we’re going to have to create it,” he said.

The Luck Lab was in the right place to do that since the Institute for Advanced Study, where Barnaby had an academic appointment, is famous as a font for big ideas. Over the years, it has attracted geniuses from around the world—and it’s fun to drive around the local streets which are named after many of them. Along with Einstein, the great mathematician Kurt Godel was a professor there and so was the early computer maven and game theory pioneer John von Neumann. Renowned physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, also known for his work building the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos laboratory, was a longtime director.

And Barnaby and I felt we were the right team to tackle the project. We had very different backgrounds and life experiences. I’ve spent my career as a journalist, magazine editor, and TV producer in the New York City area and raised two terrific sons with my handsome doctor-husband. Barnaby grew up in Alaska as the oldest of five children and was homeschooled and largely self-taught. He spent a lot of time in the outdoors and never stepped into a classroom until he started at college—at which point he launched into academic and career experiences that took him around the globe. A quirky and original thinker, he knows more people than anybody I’ve ever met. He recently settled in New York City with his wife Michelle and their two very young and adorable daughters—though “settled” is never the right word for him.

We hoped our research in luck would be powerful and game-changing and give people a new view of their own lives and experiences. Barnaby had already been coming up with strategies about opportunity and risk and effort and how they affect your ability to transform your future. It was all very erudite and heady, and my job would be to bring it down to earth and see how the theories worked in everyday life.

As a practical schedule, Barnaby would escape to this ivoriest of towers every Monday and Tuesday to make conceptual models and try to develop theories of luck that worked across all contexts—whether you were trying to get a job, find a mate, or survive as a species in the evolutionary sweepstakes. On Wednesdays we would meet and talk it through. Along the way, I would find the academics, entrepreneurs, and celebrities who could illustrate the points and help us both see how people could wittingly or not make luck happen for themselves.

By the end of the year, we would know exactly what it takes to make yourself lucky. This new science of luck would have straightforward principles that would work to make things go better in all aspects of your life.

“Beyond the theoretical work, it’s important to understand the right actions to take so you can put yourself on the luck-making path and create the destiny you want for yourself,” Barnaby said.

We were so engrossed in conversation that we hardly noticed how muddy we were getting as we slipped and slid along the (actual) path where we were walking. By the end, my canvas shoes were thoroughly soaked and caked with dirt.

“Luck may be like gratitude in that a lot depends on your perspective,” I told Barnaby as we emerged from the woods. “I consider this a very lucky walk in that we have exciting ideas and a good plan. But someone else might see it as unlucky that I have to throw away my shoes.”

He smiled. “Sacrifices are always made in the name of science.”

I looked down at my muddy feet. Part of luck was about finding new opportunities. Compared to that, finding new shoes shouldn’t be very hard.

A couple of days after we got back from Princeton, Barnaby suggested I take a first shot at seeing how our basic theory worked in practice. If we were right that you made your own luck, could I try to get lucky on one particular day?

For this experiment I didn’t need a blackboard full of equations. I would simply try to create my own luck.

My day didn’t look to be very exciting—I planned to do a few errands in the morning, then go to Penn Station and catch a train to visit my wonderful mother-in-law.

“Does any part of that sound lucky to you?” I asked Barnaby.

It also happened to be Friday, May 13th—not the obvious day to have beautiful opportunities fall from the sky.

But Barnaby asked me to set out on my day with a slightly different perspective than usual. He gave me some basic guidelines for luck—I should stay attentive to opportunities, be prepared for anything, and try the unexpected.

“And luck will just rain down on me?” I asked dubiously.

Since it was already storming outside, it would have been better for some sunshine to appear. But a challenge is a challenge, and I was intrigued.

My day started unremarkably with visits to the post office and drugstore, and then I headed to Penn Station. I had left plenty of time and arrived early (way too early) for my 10:15 am train. Penn Station is grim and dreary, and hanging out there didn’t feel very lucky at all.

But with the advice to be prepared, I had studied the train schedule and knew there was an earlier train at 9:46. I didn’t think there was time to make it—but why not try?

When I ran to the gate, the escalator was (mysteriously) going up from the track, not down to it. I dashed over to a security guard hanging out nearby and asked what to do.

“You have to go all the way around to the other side and take the staircase,” he said.

I felt momentarily defeated—the train was leaving in about one minute and the corridor to the other side looked long. But I thought of a high school coach who used to cheer “Go for it! Take a chance!” So I ran around the station to the staircase, galumphed down the steps, and got onto the train a moment before the doors closed.

What luck!

I felt a surge of triumph. It was a small victory, but I had made it happen.

Wait a minute. Was that the secret? I could control more than I realized?

A week earlier, I had been in almost the identical situation and hadn’t hustled quite as much. The train door (literally) slammed in my face. That felt like an unlucky day, while this one suddenly felt much more positive.

With the train success in my mind, I felt a surge of confidence. I arrived at the other end earlier than planned so took a pleasant walk to my mother-in-law’s apartment (the rain had even stopped) rather than taking a cab. We went out for lunch and chatted cheerfully with the waitress at the diner. I thanked her for making me a salad that wasn’t on the menu and confided that I was trying to make lucky things happen all day. At dessert, the waitress brought over a chocolate cupcake with a candle in it.

“This one’s on us. A lucky day is worth celebrating,” the waitress said.

Catching an earlier train and getting a free chocolate cupcake weren’t exactly earth-shattering events. But on a Friday the 13th, they definitely counted on the good side of luck.

When I reported this story to Barnaby the next day, I was somewhere between amazed and baffled. I was starting to agree that luck isn’t a magical and mystical force that falls from the sky—it’s something that we can (at least partly) create for ourselves. That’s fairly stunning to realize since most of us sit back and hope for good luck –when we really should be taking the right steps to make it happen. The sharp-tongued Australian novelist Christina Stead noted in 1938 that “a self-made man is one who believes in luck and sends his children to Oxford.” In other words, chance plays a role in life, but it’s not everything. The foundations for luck are set by our own actions—what we try, who we talk to, how fast we decide to run for the train.

If luck is all around us, waiting to be found, then we had to stop walking right by it on the sidewalk or whizzing by in our SUVs. Lucky occurrences usually aren’t as haphazard as they may first appear. It’s true that fortune is not fairly distributed and some options are beyond your control. I had been born in the United States to middle class parents who wanted me to advance, and in the history of the world, that counted as an enormous, unbelievable privilege. But no matter how you start out or where you hope to land, knowing the dynamics of chance changes. . . .well, your chances.

“You can uncover the luck, grab it for yourself, and share it with friends!” Barnaby told me now.

To make good luck, you need the right information so you can prepare for the right actions. Knowing the right steps keeps you from being buffeted by forces you can’t control and gives you power over more aspects of your life. We often have greater control over our future than we realize. It was exciting to think that I didn’t have to wait for lucky days—I could make them. The more I thought it about, the more I started to see the roles people had in making their own luck, and a simple formulation suddenly became clear to me — real luck occurs at the intersection of chance, talent, and hard work. Now all I had to do was prove it.